Pallets, generally formed of wood, are used in the transportation and storage of packaged goods contained in individual containers, such as boxes, cartons, sacks, bags and the like of various sizes. The boxes are stacked in a pallet size load on the pallet and generally retained thereon by retaining means such as wire, rope, thermoplastic or tarpaulin sheets. The loaded pallet is generally then raised by a pallet truck and transported to a truck or railcar for transporation to its destination.
The loaded pallet, generally, ultimately ends up at a retailer of the packaged goods, where the individual containers are generally unloaded from the pallet for display on countershelves or the shop floor. This unloading generally requires individual handling of each or a small number of the containers for restacking on the shelves or floor. Occasionally, the loaded pallet may be used as delivered as a temporary base for the containers in a warehouse or retail establishment until the boxes are individually removed therefrom for stacking elsewhere or sold.
The pallet truck used to raise, lower and transport the pallet is generally a single operator, electrically driven vehicle having a pair of fixed forks which engage the pallet by slipping between the support members of the pallet.
Unlike the more powerful larger fork-lift trucks, pallet trucks generally are not adapted to provide convenient interchangeable and variable inter-fork distances to enable various pallets of different sizes to be readily adapted to be raised. In North America, the width of each individual fork and the inter-fork distance of a pallet truck are either generally standard or are custom made.
A significant economic factor which adds to the cost of handling of goods in pallet form is the eventual manual unloading of the individual cartons, boxes and the like for subsequent stacking for display in those environments where a display arrangement of a plurality of the cartons is desired. This manual manipulation of individual boxes is more pronounced and more wasteful of time, effort and money when several pallet loads of goods are desired to be displayed together in an arrangement for either ready access by the customers and/or for advertisement purposes.
This problem can be alleviated, somewhat, if the dimensions of the boxes, cartons and the like are such as to permit a full loading of the individual boxes on the pallet utilizing the maximum area of the pallet load area, and if the individual pallets are of a sufficiently large size to permit the forks of the standard pallet truck to engage the pallet in the normal manner, such that a plurality of loaded pallets can adjacently intimately, abut one another. This arrangement should cause no loss of shop floor area.
However, in those instances where pallets of a normal standard size, for example, 1 m wide by 1.2 m deep, are not desired, such that transportation and disposition of the loaded pallet by the standard pallet truck cannot provide the intimate abutting relationship of adjacent loaded pallets, valuable shop floor area is lost.
In the very competitive world of retailing, the maximum shop floor area available for goods storage and advertising is sought. Thus, heretobefore, in order to achieve this goal with containers of atypical sizes, manual unloading of the pallets has been necessary.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a pallet for use with a standard pallet truck which permits two or more pallets to adjacently, intimately abut one another to allow maximum use of floor space.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a combined pallet and goods display assembly which can be provided already assembled to a retailer.